In digital image compression, various scanning requirements, some of which are complex, are imposed. For example, standards such as JPEG2000 have complex scanning requirements that require separate instructions to generate address sequence of reads. (See Information Technology—JPEG 2000 Image coding System—Part I: Core Coding System, ISO/IEC 15444-1:2000.) In particular, addresses are generated for load and store operations on data. Most signal processors compute the scanning address or have the address statically passed in with an instruction. This not only requires more instructions but also uses more power. Moreover, as the complexity of address generation is increased, simple incrementing counters become less or not effective.